Sinn Féin - On Your Side

What Kind of Europe in Thirty Years Time

They say that a week is a long
time in politics. Political forecasting is always a risky business,
perhaps never more so than when attempting to predict the political
shape of a continent in three decades time.

Who, thirty years ago, would have
predicted the current shape of the EU? Well, some academics and
political pundits no doubt, either devotees of the founding fathers or
trenchant critics of a process of rolling European integration might
have foreseen the development of the system that we have today. But I
think it’s fair to say that the vast number of Irish people, and I would
hazard, people across other member states, could never have envisaged
the transformation of what was a trading bloc in the 1970s into a
political union with federalist ambitions.

Of course, the
political objective of a Federation was there from the beginning. This
is openly acknowledged on the continent, but has been denied by
generation after generation of Irish politicians. The first
step was the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, which launched the
European Coal and Steel Community Treaty, the precursor of the EEC. The
Schuman Declaration announced that this Coal and Steel Community, which
pooled the relevant industries of France, Germany, Italy and Benelux,
was "a first step in the Federation of Europe."

Over the last thirty
years we have seen many other steps as the journey towards full EU
integration has been pursued incrementally. The 1957 Rome Treaty, the
1987 Single European Act, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the 1998 Amsterdam
Treaty, the 2002 Nice Treaty, and then the proposed EU Constitution,
have been presented to the Irish people and the peoples of the other EU
countries as modest steps towards higher economic growth, higher
incomes and more jobs. But in effect each was laying a new
footprint for the EU.

This latest EU Treaty proposed
repealing all the existing EC/EU treaties and founding which would be in
effect a new European Union on the basis of its own Constitution, just
like any State, rather than on treaties between sovereign States as
before.

Democratic legitimacy is claimed
for this journey, not unreasonably you may say, on the basis that each
treaty step had to be ratified by member states. For the most part this
happened by parliamentary ratification, in Ireland and some other states
by popular referendum. The setbacks, when the people came back with the
‘wrong answer’ - whether in Ireland, Denmark or Sweden - were put down
to domestic political factors in the particular state or were blamed on
the ignorance of the electorate. Popular unease or discontent with
the direction of the EU project was not seriously countenanced by the
political movers and shakers. Until last May. French rejection of the
proposed EU Constitution changed everything, or so it seems. We are now
in a period of reflection.

The truth is that none of us can
say with certainty what the EU will look like in thirty years time. This
is not just because of the long time scale involved, but, more
importantly because there are radically differing views as to how this
political project ought to proceed. The EU project is a contested one.
The stifling political consensus in Ireland in relation to the EU does
not alter this central truth.

The integrationist and federalist
route is just one of the EU road maps there are others. Just as
the policies pursued by the current Irish government represent just one
option – one alternative. What I don’t understand is that if
we were to debate any other topic – health, education, US foreign
policy, world poverty – we would have a healthy debate, with many
different views. But in relation to the EU, when any view - other
than the view held by the political and academic establishment, is
expressed – it is dismissed as scare-mongering, eurosceptic, naïve,
using the EU for domestic reasons. I believe that we need a real debate,
just as they had in France, on the future of the EU where all views are
respected and can be held up to critical analysis.

Advocates for the current
direction of the EU point to the enhanced economic and political power,
which member states collectively enjoy. They make much of the need for
an EU that can maximise its leverage as a global player. They tell us
that we need to counterbalance the hyper power that is the USA; that we
must see off the economic challenges of the Asian tiger economies. Ending
state ownership, creating an open market and rigorously pursuing
competition have benefited the consumer, we are told. Social Europe has
brought protections and equality for the citizen, we are told. They
assert that the concept of national sovereignty is null and void.

Reasonable? At first glance
perhaps, but let’s ‘reflect’ for a moment.

Does anyone really believe that
the answer to a North American hyper power is the creation of a European
one? What of the implicit assumption that a European military power
would be by definition more benign, a force for justice? History would
suggest otherwise. The record of European empire is no more glorious
than that of its American counterpart.

How do we compete with the Asian
tigers? Worthy talk about innovation and knowledge based societies
aside, the reality is that terms and conditions of workers across the EU
are offered up on the altar of competition.

Has state ownership really been
deserving of the odium of the EU? Are there not sectors of the economy
which should be in state ownership, in the public interest? And what
about the concept of public services, shouldn’t the state honour its
primary obligation to its citizens by guaranteeing access to affordable
vital services?

What does the social Europe really
mean? Is it just an after thought, a secondary consideration for the EU
market? I am sure that the 68 million people living in poverty and the
estimated 3 million homeless people across the union have a view of this.

If national sovereignty is defunct
what replaces it? Where is the citizen in all of this, how do the people
assert themselves to decide and shape their future, to ensure that their
needs are met? How is the EU accountable to the citizen?

Proponents of the status quo have
never answered these questions. In fact they usually brand people who
have the temerity to raise them as negative and anti-European. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Those of us, the many millions of us,
who are pro-European, who argue for a new direction and who believe that
a sustainable EU can only be built on foundations of democracy, social
solidarity.

What kind of Europe will we live
in 30 years time? That is a long time away and prophecy is
hazardous, but certain things seem clear enough.

The
core Eurofederalist project is being challenged by the people across the
EU. Many do not accept the inevitability of ongoing EU integration and
the federalist EU which will emerge from it. People are looking for an
alternative. There is no way of finessing those massive French and Dutch
No votes and I believe that a No that would be repeated more
resoundingly in Britain, Poland, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Denmark
if the governments of these countries were so foolish as to put the EU
Constitution to referendum in them.

I believe that
people want a more democratic and less centralised EU. That means
repatriating powers from Brussels to the Nation States. That was mooted
as a possibility in the Laeken Declaration which set up the Convention
that drew up the EU Constitution. The Laeken Declaration told the
Convention to consider drawing up an EU Constitutiononly
as a possibility "in the long run". But instead of that happening the
Eurofederalists who dominated it went straight to drawing up a highly
centralised Constitution that did not propose returning a single power
from Brussels to the Member States, but instead proposed abolishing the
national veto in several dozen new areas, reducing thereby national
democracy and increasing Brussels bureaucracy and centralization.

I expect that we shall see a
growing demand across the EU for the returning of powers of government
from the Brussels institutions to the Member States, in such areas as
fisheries policy for example, or foreign policy, or in relation to all
those unnecessary "harmonising" regulations like those that prevent
farmers' selling their jams and home-made bread to local people unless
they install fantastically expensive new kitchens.

So as democrats let us demand the
repatriation of powers from the EU instead of regarding the "acquis
communautaire" as an untouchable sacred cow. That is the only way the
EU can be democratised. It cannot be democratised by giving Brussels
more powers,or by giving the European Parliament more power - in which
the 32 Counties of Ireland have only 16 members out of 732.

So I expect the Europe
of 30 years time to be a continent where there will be some 50 or more
States co-operating with one another in facing common problems, but with
a balance of power between them to prevent any one dominating the
others. And the Federalist EU project will be seen by historians as a
phenomenon of the 20th Century Cold War and early post-Cold War period,
but not as permanent fixture onthe
world scene.

Europe's fortunes in 30 years
time will be much more affected by what happens in the rest of the world
- amongst the 10,000 million people that will then constitute humanity -
as compared with Europe's 500 million - than by what happens within
Europe's own borders. The European Union can be changed and
I believe, will be changed. In 30 years time we will be having a
very different debate.